But, of course, Palin isn’t a feminist — not in the slightest. What she calls “the emerging conservative feminist identity” isn’t the product of a political movement or a fight for social justice.

It isn’t a structural analysis of patriarchal norms, power dynamics or systemic inequities. It’s an empty rallying call to other women who are as disdainful of or apathetic to women’s rights as Palin herself: women who want to make abortion and emergency contraception illegal and who fight same-sex marriage rights. As Kate Harding wrote on Jezebel.com: “What comes next? ‘Phyllis Schlafly feminism?’ ‘Patriarchal feminism?’ ‘He-Man Woman Hater Feminism?'”…

Of course, by dismissing the past 40 years of feminism, women such as Palin disparage the very movement that made it possible for them to be public figures. After all, would Palin be addressing tea party rallies if Betty Friedan had never talked about the “problem that has no name?”

By tying their “feminism” to the suffragists, whose goal was realized nearly 100 years ago, they’re not-so-subtly saying that women in America have achieved equality. In fact, they don’t believe that systemic sexism exists. The conservative writer Christina Hoff Sommers, for example, says that women aren’t oppressed and that “it is no longer reasonable to say that as a group, women are worse off than men.”